Fran Magazine: Sunday Dispatch, Aug. 4-10

I have an adult sunburn and I am continuing to watch the work of David Lynch

This is the Fran Magazine Sunday Dispatch, a weekly culture diary for paid subscribers only. The Sunday Dispatch details what I’ve been watching, reading, playing, and listening to over the past week. Paid subscriptions help stabilize my writing career, but all readers — paid & not — are appreciated. You can also follow me on Instagram or Letterboxd (for free!). Thanks for reading!

Tough go

On Friday night, I was completely exhausted. I’d woken up with a dull roar of a headache that morning that progressed into a migraine by early afternoon. I slept on and off all day, lucky enough to file early on into the morning. It felt like the week of mono where I either woke up or went to bed with a migraine (or a few times, both). By 9:30 at night, I was feeling better but completely exhausted. I said: What if I went to bed at 10? How crazy would that be? I bet I’ll feel great Saturday morning. I showered, I brushed up, I took my half-melatonin dose, and as I walked into my bedroom, a big cockroach ran out from under the bed. I ushered it towards the far side of the room with a door with a pretty inelegant scream, whipping a spare shirt on the bed towards it until it ran out of the room. I then shut the door and stuffed a towel between the door and the floor.

I can tolerate the smaller cockroaches, but the big ones are too much. I spent a summer in food service working at a place where I saw the big ones — living, dead, somewhere in between — every single day and I think I clocked in all the time I need with those bugs. I’ve seen only one other giant one in our current apartment — also last August, also after several days of rain. That one got my attention by crawling over my various vitamins and prescriptions in the kitchen until the weight of its stupid body knocked something over and then I turned and saw it. Again: more screaming. I killed that one, finding its body in the cabinet with the pots and pans the next morning. “He looks so small in death,” Phil texted me at the time, which I think I thumbs downed. The appearance of the bug on Friday generated a type of “the floor is lava” reaction in me, except it’s more like “the whole apartment is lava.” I’m making any excuse I can to get the fuck out the second the sun starts to go down.

God’s perfect angel

This week largely sucked because we had to say goodbye to Claire’s pup Hunter, who despite being the baby of Brooklyn, grew to be an old man. Everyone loved Hunter — he was well-behaved and blonde¹. I watched him a few times a year after I moved out of our sometimes-shared home, and I always considered him a demure nephew, happy to do his own thing but eager to participate when invited. The last time I watched him for a couple days back in May, he approached a little girl maybe no older than five, whose mother told me she was afraid of big dogs but was working to get better at it. I told her that he was great with kids — he was — and the little girl let Hunter approach, and he immediately pressed his nose to her cheek and she laughed before giving him a big pet. We all loved him! He made it easy.

I wrote a ton this week but published nothing. Sometimes that’s just how it goes! I read two great pieces in the New Yorker, one by Parul Seghal on Sarah Manguso’s new novel recommended by Tessa and one by Clare Malone on RFK Jr. recommended by Harris. On with the show.